Picasa on Linux

In May 2006, Linux Journal was the first publication to learn that Google
planned to introduce a Linux version of Picasa, the company's digital
photo management and sharing software. This is the first time Google has
chosen Linux as the first additional platform for a formerly
Windows-only product. In the past, Google has expanded first on
Macintosh. Here's hoping that Google Earth and other originally
Windows-only Google products will migrate to Linux as well. Google runs
its massive search engine on Linux servers. Although Google won't disclose
how many servers they run, the company is widely regarded as the largest
deployer of Linux in the world.

Picasa began as the product of a Pasadena, California company by the
same name. Picasa was founded in October 2001. Google bought the
company in May 2004.

They Said It

Open source is a great way for a small, hungry company to build on a
sophisticated platform and get a competitive edge—an edge that's
precisely tailored to their specific needs—far more cheaply than it
could with proprietary software.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Work continues on the git revision control
system. Recently, Linus Torvalds
eliminated the dependency on an external diff program, resulting in
execution times a sixth of what they had been under Linux and a fiftieth
of what they had been under Cygwin. At the same time, other folks are
adding colorization support to git's diff output. In other git news,
Petr
Baudis, the Cogito maintainer, has been working on rename support. One of
git's innovations is that renames are detected at read time, when someone
wants to track the history of a file, rather than at write time, when the
file actually changes. But, implementing this read-time detection is a
challenge. Petr and a variety of others, including Linus, have taken it up
with great fervor recently.

Several bits of kernel infrastructure are on the chopping block, notably
DevFS. The option to use DevFS has been disabled since 2.6.13, three
releases ago, and Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted patches to remove the DevFS
code from each subsequent kernel release. The blkmtd
driver, allowing
memory devices to appear as block devices, is on the fast track out of the
kernel. The block2mtd driver does the same thing and hasn't seen a bug
report in more than a year, and in any case, blkmtd conflicts with
H. Peter
Anvin's klibc project, which is
vying for kernel inclusion. Andrew Morton
was more than happy to push the blkmtd removal patch over to Linus, without
requiring any fermentation time in the -mm tree.

As mentioned above, H. Peter Anvin is pushing for klibc inclusion into the
kernel. Klibc is a small, in-kernel libc, that allows certain kernel
projects to exist in user space, safe in the assumption that the interfaces
they need will be available when they need them. In this way, Linux
continues to become more like a microkernel over time, without making the
kind of speed sacrifices that have marginalized microkernels over the
years. Linus expressed his desire to see the kernel gradually
become more modular in this way several years ago, and rather than a
massive sudden effort to accomplish it, there seems to be a gentle
ongoing assumption that if code can be moved out of the kernel, this is a
good thing. Apparently, klibc is one of the good-thing enablers.

Documentation is a rare and precious stone in the Open Source world.
Recently, Chuck Ebbert put together some
additions for the ptrace(2) man
page that he'd gathered together from the linux-kernel mailing list, the
source code and his own experimentation. Various folks, including Daniel
Jacobowitz who had authored much of the functionality Chuck had documented,
were happy to see this work, and Daniel offered a bunch of suggestions for
improvement.

The 2.4 kernel tree continues to rest in
“deep maintenance mode” as Will
Tarreau puts it. Herbert
Rosmanith had asked if TPM
would be back-ported
from 2.6, but it looks like that almost certainly will not happen. Willy
has been maintaining a group of 2.4 patches gathered from various places,
not necessarily in the hopes of seeing Marcelo
Tosatti accept them into the
official 2.4 tree, but more to enable 2.4 users to keep up to date on
various drivers, without having to jump all the way into a 2.6-based
system. With 2.4 apparently stationary at last, this puts more pressure on
the 2.6 developers to find a way to bring stability to the kernel.
Recently, Linus Torvalds began insisting that new 2.6 code would be
accepted only for two weeks after an official release. After that, only bug
fixes would be taken. Some developers chafe at this restriction, but
there does not seem to be any huge outcry against it. However, although
this means that most 2.6 kernel releases will tend to be fairly stable from
an up-time perspective, it does nothing to stabilize the behaviors and
interfaces between kernel releases. For that kind of stability, someone
will need to have a new idea.

Ingo Molnar and others have implemented
“lightweight user-space priority
inheritance” support for futexes, which they say represents a significant
milestone toward providing true real-time support for user-space
applications. The issue is very controversial, partly because—as Ingo said
in his announcement—an alternative set of priority inheritance code had
been “circling Linux for years” that had bad overhead problems, buggy
implementations and was just a mess. Real-time support in Linux is
more widely controversial as well, because of the complexity it tends to
add to the kernel.

Linuxfest Northwest 2006

Linuxfest Northwest, the largest users group conference in the Pacific
Northwest, is held annually in Bellingham, Washington, 20 miles south of
the Canadian border, less than two hours from Seattle by car. Linuxfest
is put on each year by the Bellingham Linux Users Group in a joint
effort with other users groups from the area. Linuxfest is always free
of charge and open to all; this year, an estimated 800 people attended.

Each year, I am impressed by the top-notch presentations Linuxfest
manages to get. More than 40 presentations covered topics from general
interest to advanced systems administration. Presenters included people
from IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems and Oracle. Also, for the third
year, Chuck Wolber held the Alpha Geek competition. There were only
four time slots for all these presentations! They easily could expand
Linuxfest to a two-day festival, without even needing to get more
presenters.

Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) gave a
presentation called “Incoming! What's on the EFF's Radar”. He briefly
explained the EFF and then covered the topics that the EFF currently is
most worried about. He is a very engaging speaker.

Danny O'Brien from the EFF; his T-shirt says, ++ungood

Todd Trichler of Oracle explained “Oracle Contributions to
Linux”—why
Oracle is good for Linux and Linux is good for Oracle. Oracle has made
numerous contributions to Linux, including the Oracle Cluster File
System (OCFS2), which is now in the main kernel. Oracle has its own
team of Linux kernel developers, and this lets Oracle provide complete
support—no matter what breaks in a Linux Oracle system, they can fix
it, period. They cannot offer that level of support for any proprietary
operating system.

Ted Haeger of Novell showed off the results of “Desktop Innovation on
Linux at Novell”—changes inspired by usability testing, new desktop
search features (Beagle), a music player (Banshee), a photo manager
(F-Spot) and a whole bunch of slick 3-D-accelerated eye-candy effects.

Ted Haeger (Reverend Ted) from Novell.

Linuxfest is hosted each year by the Bellingham Technical College (BTC),
which is a perfect venue for a technical conference.
The BTC culinary arts students served up a barbecued salmon lunch again
this year; the weather turned rainy, but people braved the elements to
get the salmon.

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